Barely visible, easy to miss. If you weren't looking for exactly that, that's them. Likely Ayanna's hand drifted to the bow slung across her back. An old habit made visible. We don't move fast from here.
We move careful. One mistake this close and every advantage of surprise we have disappears. So what's the plan? She looked at him. Something steady in her gaze now.
Something that hadn't been there the night before when an arrow had nearly ended this partnership before it began. The plan, she said, is we find out exactly what we're facing before we decide how many of us walk out of those canyons alive. Chaitton nodded once, grim. 200 horses, he said quietly, almost to himself, eyes fixed on that distant thread of smoke. My people's whole future waiting on the other side of that ridge.
Ezra followed his gaze toward the notch in the mountains, where the smoke rose, thin and patient, marking the place, where everything that had brought the three of them together was about to collide with everything that had torn each of them apart. "Then we'd better not waste the daylight," he said. They rode on, three shadows moving toward the red rock, toward a man none of them had ever met. But all of them, in different ways, had already lost something to. Behind them, the sun began its slow fall toward the western ridge line.
Ahead of them, somewhere past the smoke, Silus Crane was about to learn that some debts, no matter how many years pass, always eventually come due. The smoke thread thinned as afternoon wore toward evening, and the three of them didn't ride straight for it. Couldn't, not with 10 men, maybe 11, sitting somewhere past that ridge with rifles and no reason to trust strangers walking into camp. So they circled instead. Why patient?
The kind of patient that costs you daylight but saves you your life. Chaitton found the first trail marker an hour before dusk. A place where wagon wheels had cut deep ruts into softer ground. Ruts that didn't belong to any raiding party moving fast with stolen stock. Ruts that belonged to something slower.
Something that stopped. This isn't Crane's camp, he said, crouched low, fingers tracing the grooves in the dirt. This is something else. Which means what? Ezra asked.
Which means somebody built a road out here that has no business existing. Ayanna had already dismounted, walking the ruts back toward a cluster of rock that hid whatever lay beyond it. Nobody hauls wagons through Red Mountain for fun. They left the horses tethered in a dry wash and went the rest of the way on foot. Quiet, because quiet was the only currency that mattered now, and none of them intended to spend it carelessly.
What they found past the rocks stopped all three of them cold. Corral, not the raiders main camp, smaller than that, tucked into a fold of canyon wall, half hidden under a lean to roof of brush and canvas, maybe 30 horses inside it. not 200 30. And beside the corral, a wagon half loaded with crates and a man in a clean coat checking a ledger by lantern light like he was doing nothing more sinister than counting cattle at a fair. That's not a raider, Ezra whispered. No, Ayanna agreed.